Hey guys!

This could be one of those really long waffly blog posts of mine that seem like they will never end, haha. In a nutshell, January was an insanely busy month for me and it will probably take me multiple blog posts to catch up to where I would like to be. For this blog I will be skipping the finer details of my Aussie Millions main event and saving that for a separate blog on its own. Instead I am going to jump around the place erratically and hopefully make some sense of the current happenings

My first Aussie Millions trip was a ton of fun. One of the things I love most about travelling to live poker events is being able to meet new people. I have always been a really social person by nature, which is actually quite a contradiction to what I spend most of my time doing. So it’s always refreshing to see that people actually exist and are not just fictional characters that exist across the screen from you day in and day out.

Spending time in real life with people that you have gotten to know online is also always an interesting experience. Out of all of the people I have met in real life that I have considered myself to know well online, I have never met someone and been surprised by their character. There are obviously always subtle personality traits that can only exist in the real world, but that is what makes it interesting to me. The two people I spent most of my January with (Chuey and BB18) are really great guys. I started this spiel by saying that Aussie Millions was a ton of fun, and it was. Having a good time is not generally about what you are doing but who you are doing it with. We had a ton of funny moments on the trip and plenty of laughter (mostly at chu’s expense).

Poker wise it was not a great trip for any of us. I guess it wasn’t a horrible one for me given that I managed to eek out a min-cash in the Main Event, but overall I have ran really bad at poker for the month of January (Perhaps a counteraction of the fact that I ran insanely good in CCR). It is obviously never helpful that I really did not grind much volume at all in January. There was just so much going on live and it would be a waste to be in Melbourne and be not enjoying the wonderful January weather or any of the amazing restaurants we ate at. I would have liked to play more days of TCOOP but it just didn’t happen so there is not much I can do about it now.

By the end of January though, I was well and truly ready to get home and see my little family. It is the longest I have spent away and even though I had a great time, it was certainly hard to be away from home for so long.

Upon my arrival home I was informed that I was not successful in becoming Pokerstars Team Online for this year. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t disappointed, yet relief was probably the overriding emotion when I found out. Obviously not relief that I didn’t get it (that would be dumb, haha), but relief that the sweat was over. There had been a lot of talk and anticipation over who would get the sponsorship throughout Aussie Millions, and just to know that there was no more tension in this regard was very relieving.I was never a frontrunner for the sponsorship and never had my hopes up too far in regards to getting it. I felt that Jesse McKenzie was the clear frontrunner from the get-go and I am still very surprised that it was not him or Benn Skender that were announced as the new member. In fact, no one was been named as yet, so it will be really interesting to see who it is that will be representing Team Online Australia for 2012. Either way I am sure Stars will have good reasons to choose who they do and I’m sure the new Team member will do an outstanding job.

I do want to take this opportunity to thank Rypac for his assistance over the past few months. I feel I was always well behind the other candidates in the running for team online, but never would have even been a blip on the Pokerstars radar had it not been for him. He basically managed me over the last few months, with his contacts and insight into the industry being absolutely priceless. He is a great guy and I am ever grateful for his help. Hopefully I can get back to making him some videos for husng.com now and stop being lazy.

There were certainly other people who contributed and helped me out through this period; Zack and Marco at Quadjacks, the numerous people who took the time to interview me/write articles, everyone who supported my promotions, those actively seeking me out on twitter for conversations, as well as the many well wishers along the way. Everyone deserves a huge thank you for believing in me and giving me some of their time. Last but not least, my family were very understanding of me taking extra time to work on certain projects. They are always patient with me in my endeavours, I love them very much and appreciate their understanding.

So anyways, it was a few days at home and back on a plane. This time I was off to my favourite place in the world; Queenstown, New Zealand. The trip has not really been poker related, instead it was all about helping the biggest life fish I know, OLD TIME GIN, to check-in to a penthouse with SkaiWalkurrr and Berndsen12. They are all only 21 and needed someone 25+ to be at the apartment. Sometimes my old age can come in handy I guess, haha.

It is pretty hard to not enjoy yourself in Queenstown, so it is probably no surprise that I had a really good time. I have known Gin for a while now and he is one of the nicest guys you will ever meet. Skai and B12 are also both great guys and even though I wasn’t there for long, it was certainly a fun experience. The highlight was definitely Skai flooding the downstairs bathroom while forgetting he was running a bath. The chaos that ensued was just priceless.

Which brings me to where I am now. Sitting on a flight from Queenstown back to Sydney. It doesn’t end here though. I am home for about a week then off to Adelaide to play the $1k Poker Zone Cup, back home for two weeks or so, then off to Seoul for APPT. Half of the year will go by without me noticing I think, haha.

This has gotten really long now, so I will save the rest of my thoughts for my next blog, as well as one in there about my Aussie Millions Main Event. I hope you are all doing great so far in 2012!

Matt 

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